Survey: AWS Dominates Highest-Paying Software Skills

Businesses are paying top dollar for employees with expertise in Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies, according to a recent report.

NovelAspect, a provider of managed cloud services, recently pored through job listing site Indeed.com to determine the most requested -- and most lucrative -- IT skills. The company analyzed listings for jobs based in the 50 most populous U.S. cities between Oct. 5 and Oct. 12.

Among its findings, NovelAspect reported that jobs relying on AWS skills were overwhelmingly the highest-paying. "Ten of the top 20 highest-paying software skills [were] related to applications produced by Amazon Web Services (AWS), and the top eight on this list were all AWS products," the company said in a blog post announcing its findings.

According to NovelAspect, the highest-paying skill overall is DynamoDB, AWS' NoSQL database product, with an average annual salary of $141,813.

Behind that, the skills that yielded the highest salaries in NovelAspect's study are (in order):

Amazon Elastic MapReduce, with an average salary of $136,250

AWS CloudFormation, $132,308

Amazon ElastiCache, $125,625

Amazon CloudWatch, $121,980

AWS Lambda, $121,481

Amazon Kinesis, $121,429

AWS Key Management Service, $117,297

Apache Kafka, $117,234

OpenStack, $116,605

AWS Elastic Beanstalk, $114,219

Amazon Redshift, $113,950

Among other things, the findings indicate the importance of cloud-based expertise, NovelAspect noted. Indeed, "cloud services" were the third most-requested skills category by employers, appearing in nearly 12 percent of all the job listings NovelAspect analyzed. This trails only skills related to "accounting and spreadsheets" and to "database management system," each of which accounted for about 18 percent of all listings.

It's no surprise that AWS skills are translating into higher paychecks. Demand for workers with expertise on the leading public cloud platform is up dramatically, according to a report earlier this year by Dice.com, which noted a 76 percent jump in the number of AWS-related job listings between 2015 and 2016.

About the Author

Gladys Rama is the senior site producer for RCPmag.com and senior editor of AWSInsider.net.